For synthetic gaming tests we used the industry standard and overlockers bragging tool 3DMark Vantage. This is a test that strives to mimic the impact modern games have on a system. FutureMark went a long way to change from the early days of graphics driven tests to a broader approach including physics, AI and more advanced graphics simulations.

3DMark Vantage uses the DX10 API in addition to having support for PhysX. Due to the PhysX support and our use of an NVIDIA GPU, we run with PhysX enabled and disabled to give you the best indication of real system performance. For testing we use the Performance test run.

3DMark Vantage shows a similar setup; ASUS and GIGABYTE at stock are almost identical. However, when overclocking comes into play GIGABYTE gets a slight boost.

CINEBENCH is a synthetic rendering tool developed by Maxon. Maxon is the same company that developed Cinema4D, another industry leading 3D animation application. CINEBENCH R10 tests your system's ability to render across single and multiple CPU cores. It also tests your system's ability to process OpenGL information.

Into our synthetic rendering and we see that overclocking helps give quite a bit of performance gain as the more clock cycles you can get through, the better the performance.

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